11.10 — Africa, and the Trickster

Africa is not one mythology. It is a continent of over a thousand languages and hundreds of distinct traditions, and treating them as a unit is the same error as treating "European mythology" as a unit.

So this chapter does two things: it covers three specific traditions properly, and then it takes the figure they share with the rest of the world.

Yoruba

From what is now south-western Nigeria, and one of the most systematically developed religious traditions in Africa.

At the top, Olodumare — the supreme being, the source, and deliberately remote. No temples, no images, no direct worship.

And beneath, the orisha — hundreds of them, each with a domain, a personality, a set of preferences, and a body of praise poetry.

Ogun, iron, war, technology, and the clearing of paths. The patron of anybody who works with metal, and by extension of surgeons and drivers.

Shango, thunder and lightning, and a historical king of Oyo who became an orisha after his death — which is a documented case of a real person entering a pantheon, and it is exactly the process 1.5 suggests for the epics.

Oshun, fresh water, love, fertility and wealth.

Eshu, the trickster and the messenger, who stands at every crossroads and must be greeted first in any ritual. Nothing reaches the other orisha except through him.

And Ifa, the divination system, which is the tradition's intellectual core. A trained diviner casts palm nuts or a chain to produce one of 256 configurations, each of which corresponds to a large body of memorised verses — stories, precedents and advice. A practitioner memorises thousands of verses.

It is a system for retrieving a relevant precedent from an enormous oral corpus by a randomising procedure, and as an information technology it is genuinely impressive.

And the Yoruba tradition survived the Atlantic slave trade and became Santería in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and elements of Vodou in Haiti — frequently by mapping the orisha onto Catholic saints so that the practice could continue under prohibition. Volume VIII covers what that period was.

The Dogon

From Mali, and worth including for one reason.

They have an elaborate cosmology involving a creator, Amma, a disorder introduced by one of the first beings, and a complex sequence of creation.

And they are famous in popular culture for a claim that they had ancient knowledge of an invisible companion star of Sirius.

This book will say plainly: the claim does not hold up. The material comes from a French anthropologist's reports in the 1930s and 1940s, later fieldwork failed to replicate it, and the most likely explanation is that the information came from contact with Europeans, including the anthropologists themselves, before it was recorded.

It is included here because it is a good example of how a story about ancient hidden knowledge propagates, and 1.1's discipline applies to African material exactly as it does to Indian.

The Bushongo creation

From Central Africa, and it is worth having because it is unlike anything else in this Part.

In the beginning there was only water and darkness, and Bumba alone.

And Bumba was in pain.

He vomited up the sun, and the water dried in places and land appeared.

Then the moon and the stars.

Then, in more pain, he vomited up nine living creatures — a leopard, an eagle, a crocodile, a fish, a tortoise and others — and finally human beings.

A creation by sickness. Nothing is spoken into being and nothing is crafted; the world comes out of a being in discomfort, expelling.

Which is a completely different metaphor from the spoken word, the sacrificed body, or the cosmic egg — and it is a reminder that the range of available images is wider than the familiar ones suggest.

Anansi

And the figure Africa gave the world.

Anansi is a spider, from the Akan people of Ghana, and he is the reason there are stories at all.

The story: all the stories in the world belonged to the sky god, Nyame.

Anansi asked for them.

Nyame named a price he considered impossible: bring me the python, the leopard, the hornets, and the invisible dwarf.

And Anansi caught all four, each by a different trick.

The python: he pretended to be arguing with his wife about whether the python was longer than a certain branch, and offered to measure — and the python stretched itself out beside it to prove its length, and was tied.

The leopard: a covered pit.

The hornets: he poured water over himself and over their nest, told them it was raining, and offered a gourd as shelter.

And in each case the trick works on the target's vanity or fear rather than by force.

He got the stories, and they became Anansesem — spider stories — and that is why every story belongs to Anansi.

And he crossed the Atlantic with the people who were enslaved, and became Aunt Nancy in the Caribbean and the American South, and is one of the very few things that survived the crossing intact.

The trickster, universally

And now the pattern, because this figure is everywhere and the recurrence is one of the strongest instances of 11.1's rhyme.

Anansi in West Africa. Eshu at the crossroads. Loki in the north (11.6). Hermes in Greece. Coyote and Raven in North America (11.11). Sun Wukong in China (11.9). Krishna stealing butter has an element of it (4.3).

And the common features are specific.

They are boundary figures. Not gods and not humans, or between the two; associated with crossroads, doorways, thresholds and messages.

They are morally unclassifiable. They help and they harm, frequently in the same story, and they are never simply on anybody's side.

They win by wit against superior force, which is why the powerless love them.

They bring something to humanity — fire, stories, tools, language — usually by theft.

And they are punished, and they are not stopped.

Why the figure exists

Three reasons, and they operate together.

Every society needs a way to talk about its own rules being arbitrary. The trickster violates the rules and demonstrates that the sky does not fall, and this is much safer as a story than as an act.

Every society has people the rules do not serve. The trickster is their representative — the one who wins by being clever because being strong is not available. This is exactly why Anansi survived the Middle Passage and why Brer Rabbit exists in the American South: a story about a small clever creature defeating a large powerful one is not neutral entertainment in a slave society.

And innovation needs a category. The person who breaks a rule and produces something valuable is a real and awkward figure, and a culture with no place for them cannot change.

What to carry from this page

Africa is a thousand traditions and the generalising word is the error. Yoruba divination and Dogon cosmology are as different from each other as Greek is from Norse.

A real king became a god, in documented history. Shango is the process, visible.

The world can be created by sickness. Bumba vomited it up, in pain, and the fact that this image is available at all is worth knowing.

And every one of Anansi's four tricks works on vanity or fear rather than on force. Which is the trickster's whole method, and the reason the powerless everywhere invented him.

Next: 11.11 — the Americas and the Pacific: a feathered serpent, a book that survived a burning, and a man who slowed the sun down.